Juan J. Martinez, Knight Foundation's Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, is the winner of South Florida Business Journal's 2010 CFO Awards in the non-profit category.

Martinez believes an effective CFO is only as good as his team. To that end, he has a very strong finance team ... Martinez has empowered them to solve problems and communicate freely so he can concentrate on adding value to management decisions "as opposed to being drawn constantly intro transactions."

This year’s Sunshine Week contest, which will be announced March 14-20, will honor local heroes of open government.

The efforts of these local heroes, whose work has made their communities a better place to live, will be recognized among media organizations and other groups throughout the nation.

Since 2005, Sunshine Week has been held annually to discuss the importance of open government and freedom of information.

The American Society of News Editors will conduct a contest to identify the top three Local Heroes of 2010.

For those interested in nominating a local hero, please fill out a nomination form. The deadline is Feb. 26.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Two Knight Foundation grantees have made MIT Technology Review’s list of 10 technologies to watch.

Printcasting, a project of Participata, which is currently testing a service that allows amateur publishers to create newsletters and magazines, is supported by an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge.

The second Knight Foundation project on the list is the Ushahidi Engine, which is developing an open-source platform that allows amateur and professional journalists to respond rapidly to regional crises through mobile phone, e-mail or Web interface.

For the remaining eight technologies to watch, follow the link.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Vivian Celeste Neal, Knight Communities Program Director to Akron and Northeast Ohio, was featured in the Akron Beacon Journal today. She will be retiring Feb. 26.

When Neal came to the foundation, ''she not only brought a lifetime of insight and experience, but a love for Akron, her community,'' said Alberto Ibargüen, president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation. ''She has been a player in Knight's involvement in Team NEO, the University Park Alliance, the Austen BioInnovation Institute, education projects with Akron's school board and superintendent and countless other small and big projects around town. She understands Akron, she loves Akron, she wants Akron to succeed. And her work always showed it.''

You can read the entire story at Ohio.com

As the popularity of social media and short-form messages grow, it's only appropriate that awards season includes what is being dubbed the “Oscars of Twitter.” The second annual Shorty Awards will be held March 3 at TheTimesCenter in The New York Times Building. The awards are sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

The Shorty Awards honor the best producers of short real-time content on Twitter, who are nominated by users in 27 official categories and new crowd-sourced ones. The newly created Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences help select winners from groups of finalists. The academy is comprised of leaders in technology, journalism, business and culture and actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), New York Times technology columnist David Pogue (@pogue), entertainer MC Hammer (@mchammer) and Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen (@ibarguen), among others.

Here's a peek at some of the front-runners in a finance, food and government categories:

Nominations began earlier this month and end Friday, January 29, 2010 at 11:59:59 pm Pacific time. If you're already on Twitter, you can nominate and vote for your favorite users by using the voting box at http://shortyawards.com/.

Knight Foundation CEO and Chairman of the Newseum Board of Trustees Alberto Ibargüen introduced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to an audience at the Newseum today in Washington, D.C.. Secretary Clinton stated that Internet freedom should be a right for everyone, and that the United States has a responsibility in helping protect the free exchange of ideas on the world's information infrastructure.

Secretary Clinton mentioned the launch of a competition to improve information exchanges:

"... There are companies, individuals, and institutions working on ideas and applications that could already advance our diplomatic and development objectives. The State Department will be launching an innovation competition to give this work an immediate boost. We’ll be asking Americans to send us their best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need. Microsoft, for example, has already developed a prototype for a digital doctor that could help provide medical care in isolated rural communities. We want to see more ideas like that. And we’ll work with the winners of the competition and provide grants to help build their ideas to scale."

You can watch video of the speech at C-SPAN. A full transcript of the speech is available at the U.S. Department of State.

Back when we launched the Knight News Challenge in 2006, using contests to spur innovation was a relatively new concept. But in just four years, the number of similar competitions in the media, information and communication field has doubled.

So we decided to take a closer look at the contests globally, to see if we could adapt any lessons to improve the News Challenge.  We reviewed all 29 contests, including the Stockholm Challenge, NetSquared  N2Y4 Challenge, We Media Pitch It and Sunlight Lab Apps for America contests, and explored their judging criteria, outreach and marketing plans, application and selection processes. Along the way, we also interviewed former News Challenge judges and entrepreneurs for their insights too.

Today, we want to share the resulting study, conducted by Arabella Advisors, with the greater community. We hope anyone running or hoping to launch a contest – or innovators searching for funding – will find it as useful as we did.

You can access the PDF of this study here.

- Mayur Patel, Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora

Note: This post is cross-posted at the News Challenge blog.

Knight Foundation CEO and President Alberto Ibargüen has long said that information is a core community need, as vital to a society's health as jobs, roads and electricity. And in the wake of a crisis like the devastating earthquake in Haiti, a community's information infrastructure can fail just like its power grid and transportation network.

So Knight is giving $200,000 to an international media development group called Internews to keep the country's radio stations broadcasting during the disaster:

Knight Foundation officials said they fear broken communication systems could prevent aid from being distributed efficiently, and the grant is meant to help retain the country's battered information infrastructure.

Without that system in place, Internews officials warned, survivors might not know where to go for food, medicine, or how to find missing friends and family.

Internews plans to ship a 300-watt transmitter from Paris to Port-au-Prince, where it is expected to broadcast messages that can be picked up by radios up to 30 miles outside of the demolished city.

The Knight Foundation reported that Internews estimated at least 12 of the city's radio stations and one national broadcaster got back on the air Saturday.

For more information about the grant, read the story from the Miami Herald. Knight grantee Ushahidi has compiled a list of ways you can help survivors in Haiti.

When tragedy struck in Haiti last week, the folks at Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, leapt into action. By Tuesday evening, they were hard at work, collecting and mapping eyewitness reports from the area devastated by a catastrophic earthquake.

A story in today's Washington Post highlights their work:

The site is www.Ushahidi.com, and it allows users to submit eyewitness accounts or other relevant information for disaster zones via e-mail, text or Twitter -- and then visualize the frequency of these events on a map. By Friday, Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, had received nearly 33,000 unique visitors, and several hundred personal reports that mainstream news organizations might not hear about. [...]

Taken individually, these bits of data might not be terribly useful. The goal is that by aggregating the incidents in a visual format, people and organizations using the site will be able to see patterns of destruction, to determine where services should be concentrated. A red dot on the map, for example, signifies that looting is happening near a town called Pétionville; another shows that Hotel Villa Creole has become a site of medical triage.

On the Ushahidi blog, founder Ory Okolloh and director of strategic operations Patrick Meier have been sharing insights on the organzation's response to the crisis and how it will develop over the coming days. Okolloh writes:

Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.

Ushahidi is also aggregating resources for information about the crisis and how you can help. Look here for instructions on embedding Ushahidi's crisis map on your own site.

The latest round of winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge were announced today. The Challenge - a five-year, $24 million initiative that helps community and place-based foundations find and support local news and information projects - is part of a growing movement to help make sure residents are informed and engaged. According to the news release, "J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, recently found that more than 207 foundations have funded $135.86 million in grants to 128 projects since 2005."

Included in this round of KCIC winners are a diverse range of projects - from raising public awareness on vital local issues to creating online community forums to stimulate dialogue among residents to conducting an online cultural treasure hunt. The list of winners also includes the Challenge's first collaboration among several local foundations seeking to make a regional impact. From the news release:

“Information is as important to a thriving democracy as clean air, jobs and schools. As leaders, local foundations are taking the initiative to meet those information needs,” said Trabian Shorters , Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities, who leads the Challenge. “These projects help ensure that everyone has the information necessary to make decisions about their governments and their lives.”

You can read details about all of the winning projects at InformationNeeds.org.

Speaking of InformationNeeds.org, the site has been redesigned in conjunction with today's announcement. There, you'll not only find more information about the Challenge, but also information on the upcoming Media Learning Seminar, as well as plenty of archived video resources from past seminars.